Evotype: a novel concept to understand the engineering aspect of evolution

Ayooshi Mitra, Amity University Kolkata

The world has seen a revolution in the ability to engineer biology and create living systems with novel functions over the last few decades. Nonetheless, several obstacles continue to obstruct our ability to fully exploit biology’s potential. These are a consequence of the fact that individuals cannot engineer the elements of life without engineering its properties as well, and life’s most fundamental property is that it evolves. Engineering living systems is a fundamentally different challenge than engineering other mediums, due to evolution.

Engineers have been taking advantage of the fact that evolution is an extremely effective problem solver for decades. Directed evolution, for example, can be used to optimize or even generate completely novel traits in proteins or cells. However, these methods rely on evolution’s ability to find solutions in a reasonable amount of time. The search space for most systems is so large that the initial step in this process must have the potential to generate useful phenotypes quickly. Here comes in evotype: a novel concept to understand the engineering aspect of evolution.

A recent study was published to better understand biology’s capabilities and to highlight the need for a new way of thinking about the evolutionary properties of engineered biosystems. The researchers created a design for potential evolutionary change. According to the study, the ‘design type’ is defined as a system that has been engineered and consists of a single genotype. Any biosystem capable of evolution could be the design type: a protein, genetic circuit, virus, cell, animal, plant, or even an ecosystem. To capture the evolutionary properties of that system, the concept of ‘evotype’ is introduced. The evotype is a collection of evolutionary dispositions of the design type, like how genotype and phenotype are collections of genes and traits, respectively. A disposition, unlike a trait, is a potential property of the system rather than a directly observable property. A protein, for example, may have the evolutionary disposition of instability, which causes its structure to change dramatically when mutated. Designing the dispositions of the evotype is a fundamental challenge in engineering biology.

The researchers hope to achieve one of two goals when designing the evotype: the first is evolutionary stability, in which a system changes its function as little as possible as it evolves during use; the second is specific evolvability, in which the system can easily evolve new phenotypes of a specific class (i.e., the classes of a function specified by the engineer) or adapt to changing environmental conditions (i.e., continuing to produce the desired chemical product).

The evotype: a novel concept to understand the engineering aspect of evolution, is a new way of thinking about the properties of engineered biosystems and how they interact. It is a framework for considering an important but often overlooked property: the role of the biosystem in its evolution. This is especially important because the impact of an intervention (e.g., a new mutational method) is directly tied to the system’s composition.

Engineering provides a new perspective on evolutionary theory. It also represents a new way of thinking about what engineers do and how the design process works in the context of bioengineering. With some modifications, the concept of the evotype may also find use in evolutionary science, where it provides a framework for considering the mechanistic constraints of evolution as well as a way of discussing the evolutionary characteristics of organisms. It could also be used in fields other than biological engineering to develop new self-adaptive technologies.

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References:

1. Castle, S.D., Grierson, C.S. & Gorochowski, T.E. Towards an engineering theory of evolution. Nature Communications, 12, 3326 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23573-3
2. University of Bristol. (2021, June 8). Scientists develop the ‘evotype’ to unlock power of evolution for better engineering biology. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 10, 2021. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210608154416.htm

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